I wanted to try btrfs with lzo compression for /usr/portage, hoping for the compression to speed things up.
Its partition size is only 512MiB. Unfortunately, the data does not even fit with btrfs. What a showstopper!

It's a pity ext4 can't do compression. However, both its stability and configurability are great and I had no problems so far.

You need to enable the "-M" option when creating a small partition with btrfs. Otherwise it will use a lot of space for metadata. Regarding compressing /usr/portage you should probably use something like squashfs.

The -M option is available if you install btrfs-progs-9999.
What it does is store the metadata WITH the data to be more space efficient.

happy days !

once more formatting the partitions

didn't know the progs had to be that recent

thx !

IIRC the patches are fairly old. I think Josef Bacik sent the patches in to make BtrFS usable on small devices. This was because people from moblin/meego wanted to use BtRFS on their mobile devices (so yeah.. pretty old).. But then again, btrfs-progs doesn't get updated very often. It's been 0.19 for ages!

The -M option is available if you install btrfs-progs-9999.
What it does is store the metadata WITH the data to be more space efficient.

happy days !

once more formatting the partitions

didn't know the progs had to be that recent

thx !

IIRC the patches are fairly old. I think Josef Bacik sent the patches in to make BtrFS usable on small devices. This was because people from moblin/meego wanted to use BtRFS on their mobile devices (so yeah.. pretty old).. But then again, btrfs-progs doesn't get updated very often. It's been 0.19 for ages!

It's not a big problem to patch the kernel sources. You can also add chris mason's stuff and replace things on your local kernel as there aren't too many deps outside of btrfs..._________________Blog | btrfs | Please stand by - The mailer daemon is busy burning your messages in hell...

Last time I posted in this thread 16 months ago. Is btrfs still a fail?_________________There is, a not-born, a not-become, a not-made, a not-compounded. If that unborn, not-become, not-made, not-compounded were not, there would be no escape from this here that is born, become, made and compounded. - Gautama Siddharta